


Black Out Days

by triedunture



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: HYDRA Trash Party, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Memory Loss, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Rape, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-14 00:31:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2171157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's not empty. His mind is all over the place. </p><p>The rape is not explicit, but it's there, so please heed the tags. </p><p>Title from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0ul-BghOAs">Phantogram's song</a> of the same name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Out Days

It hurts to freeze, but it hurts more to thaw. Sensation returns as nothing but pain, a searing, white-hot agony that floods his system. He remembers this pain, but it's wrapped up in a hundred memories of hurt. A trench, a hotel room, a rooftop, a field, an alleyway: it's impossible to parse it all out. 

Today it's a basement. If there is such a thing as today. Time, he thinks, may not actually exist anymore, if it ever did in the first place. 

There are three shapes in the room, shrouded in black. His vision is coming back to him but he doesn't want it. "Who." He grits his teeth. "Are." He shuts his eyes. "You." 

They never answer. Needles slide into his arm, his only arm. The metal one jerks as if it's a part of him, but it's not. They sewed it onto his shoulder; he'd never wanted it. It hurts, because everything hurts. 

Someone forces something between his teeth and speaks in Russian. Something about the power. He understands the words because they've taught him the language. They must have. There are voices in his head speaking five, no, six languages, and they're all saying the same thing: 

Survive, survive, survive. 

A man in a white coat takes one step over the little white line on the floor, and that's all he needs. The man becomes a body, and the restraints become nothing but tatters, and an alarm blares in his ears, which hurts. (But everything always does.) 

He doesn't reach daylight before they're on him. Then it's back to the black, back to the cold. 

Waking up the next time, or maybe a thousand times after that—who can tell when time is a lie?—they give him something that makes him slow and tired. He does what they tell him to because the voices still whisper their singular directive in his brain. 

They bring a blond boy into the room. The boy is not scared, just stares down at him as they strap him in place. Calmer this way, a voice says. The white coats turn away and the boy leans down to whisper in his ear, "Hello, meal ticket." He blinks. No, the boy is a man. And the basement has become a warehouse. 

No, no, no, none of this is right. The white coats—their hair is cut differently, their neckties are wide, then thin, then wide again. The only thing he can remember is how to lock and load fourteen new kinds of firearms. How much time has he lost?

It's been years, the blond man tells him.

There's a needle in his arm again. His blood thaws into fire. How many? he asks.

The blond man gives him a number. It's an impossible number. So either this is not real or time is not real. And this hurts too much to be imagined, so that settles that. There are no years, there are no days. There is only the cold and the black and the weapon and the kill. 

He opens his eyes, then closes them. Voices screaming. Survive. 

"Oh no you don't." It's the blond man, older once again. Stronger. God, in a certain light it's almost like— 

Don't think of that, another voice says. The mission. Concentrate. 

It's just the two of them, and it's not a warehouse or a laboratory or a bunker this time. It's somewhere near the ocean; he can smell the salt and rot. 

Escape. Yes, he needs to break out of this prison. Except if time doesn't exist, when is he supposed to escape? 

"Now, now, soldier. Remember your training," the blond man says. A name swims to the surface: pierce. The thing he does with his needles. Pierce, the name of the man who holds the leash. 

Someone else is supposed to give him orders but he can't remember who. The name is lost. It's like trying to find a single silver pin in a field the size of Manhattan. He can't grasp it. 

Every time he wakes up, it's new names, new places, new parameters. They tried to steal his memories, before. Then they realized they could just bury them. They turned him into a dump site for words and lessons. It's too much, he's too full, bursting at the seams with it all. Thin-skinned and overripe. 

The cylinder is where they keep him in the cold. The blond man pushes him toward it, forcing him into its gaping mouth. No, stay warm, stay moving, stay active. Survive. 

One more trip into the black and he'll lose what he's trying to find, he knows it. They'll squeeze it out of his brain, nothing but paste from a tube. He scrabbles for purchase in the doorway of the chamber. It's just the two of them now. And he is strong, too. 

(It used to be the two of them, before. Except time is torn in half, so maybe it's still the two of them, somewhere: him and his true boy, not this fake they brought in to fool him.) 

"Don't embarrass yourself," Pierce hisses, shoving him into the cold chamber with all his strength. 

He braces his hands on the slick metal of the chamber's inner wall and refuses to be moved further. The metal wall is as reflective as a pool of water. That's not his face, those aren't his eyes. They put someone else's eyes in his head just like they put something else in place of his arm. Where are all the parts they took from him?

"Get _in_ ," Pierce orders. 

Don't move. Survive. Keep the pieces alive. He's half-in and half-out of the cold.

"You won't budge? Fine. Your decision." 

The door slams down on him. The jaws of the chamber bite into his waist, metal teeth tearing into his skin. He bleeds sticky and warm. 

He howls. 

They're eating him, he thinks. He's been thrown to the monster, and the mission is lost. But the thing inside him, buried under all the garbage they've shoveled into his head, that won't die. He can't even remember it, not now, but he had once. And since time is a fairytale, all that matters is that he once knew. 

Tears slip down his false face. The pain is always immense, but now it's a different shape, jagged and terrible. 

"You must think you're really brave when you act up like this." Pierce's voice is muffled by the nearly-shut chamber door. "This isn't the first time you've tried to defy orders and failed. Remember?"

He doesn't remember, he can't remember. If he tries to bring up that memory from the depths, he risks losing his grip on the frayed rope that binds the things that matter to him. He is not brave, he doesn't think so. He's desperate and nameless. The tears keep dripping, and so does his blood. 

He's glad. If it all drips out, maybe it will take away some of the things they put inside him. A flash, a priest, fingertips in clear water: cleanse me of my inequity. Then that memory is gone too.

It's right there on the tip of his tongue, the thing he's dying to protect. 

"Got nothing to say now, do you?" 

Oh. Pierce is still there. Strange, he'd thought the man had gone. Time can speed up, it sometimes slows down. It can do what it likes; there are no rules. 

Pierce's hand is on his bare hip. They keep him naked whenever they can. There are no rules. The things they put inside him, the languages mixing in his head. He stares into the mirror of metal in front of him. He can just make out the blurry smudge of Pierce on the other side of the glass behind him, grunting away. The pain never leaves, it just takes on a different shape. Sometimes it's shaped like a man.

Hold on, hold on, hold on just for one moment longer.

(If moments really exist.)

It hurts, the way Pierce forces him further onto the metal teeth, the way he's forced. It hasn't stopped hurting for an impossible number of years. He can't go under again, he won't let them have it, the bright thing, the missing piece. He has to live, and he has to die. His head pounds, and pounds. 

"Steve," he gasps out between sobs. It's a small whimper, an unheard echo over the creak of machinery and the slap of flesh. Pierce doesn't hear it. It's still safe. 

He bites his lip and keeps it hidden. The memory comes back to cradle his aching head; the Captain, the honest boy with the yellow hair, his Steve, his own Steve. Somehow both large and small. 

How could he have forgotten? Even after they buried his own name, how could he forget Steve's? What kind of traitor is he?

A dozen white coats and black masks will use him after Pierce is done. It won't matter. He has it, his last shard. And he survived. He breathes. The pain still surges, and that means he's won. 

"Going to keep your mouth shut next time?" Pierce asks once it's over. The maw of the chamber opens, and Bucky curls up on the cold metal floor of the cylinder, holding his wounds. Steve, he repeats over and over in his head. The noise of it drowns out all else like a triumphant drumbeat. 

Steve, he thinks, and smiles under all the tears and the sweat. Steve, he thinks as his blood oozes in patterns on the floor. And just before the cold comes again, he vows he won't ever forget, even if it's the last thing he—

The black recedes, the door opens. It's been an eyeblink. It's been a decade. 

He stands on strong legs and steps out of the chamber. Someone hands him body armor. Someone else hands him a gun. 

Time is a liar. There is only the now. The frayed rope is gone as if it, too, never existed. There is only the soldier, filled to overflowing, spilling and spilling and spilling. 

And the next time he hears a name he may once have died for, he remembers nothing of it. He only labels it Target and does what he's always done. 

Survive.


End file.
